Foxconn

When talking about Chinese corporate culture, it is difficult to ignore the issues that have been brought up over the years by the media, portraying large Chinese corporations as bastions bursting with underpaid and overworked staff, demanding ever increasing work hours and commitment to the company. The most notorious and probably the most well-known case among the public is Foxconn, reaching the sad record of fourteen suicides and dozens more attempted in 2010 (Moore 2010; Pomfret a.o. 2010; Tam 2010). Further articles have been published, often quoting the so-called “wolf culture” of Chinese companies, which seeds out the weakest links within the employees and enforces an idea of constant pressure to keep up and meet demand (CLB 2008). Nevertheless the current success of Chinese companies is unquestionable, as more and more companies start not only producing large quantities, but increasingly also high quality products for highly competitive prices. For my paper, I have chosen to look at two of these highly successful companies, which have been creeping up on markets dominated by Western, Japanese and Korean firms (Osawa 2015; Waldmeir 2012).
To further understand why and how these companies have become so successful, my approach is to look deeper into the corporate culture of these companies and stack them against each other. Should my hypothesis be correct, these companies should feature similar corporate cultures, which, while not necessarily a cause of their success, is definitely a remarkable correlation.

This paper questions the binary of material and immaterial labor in the information era. Instead, we propose a “circuits of labor” model, a holistic framework that helps connect various concepts and traditions in the study of labor and ICT (information and communication technology). Inspired by du Gay et al’s “circuit of culture”, we argue conventional frameworks need to be synthesized and updated to reflect fundamental changes and persisting issues of labor in our contemporary era, of which the iPhone is emblematic.

This article examines how global value chains (GVCs) have shaped a world factory regime, based on the case study of the Foxconn group in Shenzhen, China. We identify three features that characterize a world factory regime: the GVCs’ impacts, the fragmented structure of corporate governance, and workplace despotism, and propose a concept of “global fragmented despotism” to explain changing labor conditions, workers’ suicides and resistance uncovered in Foxconn since 2010.

Čaněk, M. (2016). Building the European centre in Czechia: Foxconn's local integration in regional and global labour markets (pp. 95 - 111). In Andrijasevic, R, Sacchetto, D & Drahokoupil, J, 2016, Flexible workforces and low profit margins: electronics assembly between Europe and China. Brussels: ETUI.

This study used an international perspective to analyze how newspapers in the United States and China framed a specific global sweatshop issue: a continuous spate of suicides at the Foxconn Technology Group, a major supplier to Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 92 newspaper articles appearing in US and Chinese newspapers, this study found Chinese

In Europe, as elsewhere in the global North, the label “Made in China” has become synonymous with low wages, excessive overtime, and exploitative working conditions. Conventional literature on the international division of labor reifies the North–South divide in particular with respect to class formation and labor agency. Contrasting the working conditions in China to those in Europe sets these up as opposites in their managerial practices and treatment of the workforce. This article challenges such dualism and makes visible the commonalities of contemporary global capitalism. It does so by examining Foxconn’s production regimes in China and the Czech Republic and identifying a specific set of strategies on the part of the firm that enable its global organization of production. In indicating which practices Foxconn imported from China and which are an outcome of global extended production, the article challenges the Chinese political economy literature that posits the “Chinese model” as warranted when production is globally organized.

본 연구는 선전에서 활발히 전개되고 있는 사회복지의 일상적 연행에 관한 문화기술지(ethnography)로서, 중국 정부가 민간의 자율성을 고취시키는 방향으로 민생문제를 해결하려는 과정에서 새롭게 등장한 사회복지사들이 당-국가의 말단 동원부대로 전락하게 된 배경과 기제를 고찰하고 있다. 구체적인 현지조사는 선전 외곽 폭스콘 공장지대에 설립된 커뮤니티 서비스센터(社區服務中心)를 중심으로 진행되었는데, 연구자는 사회서비스의 ‘생산자’가 아니라 ‘구매자’임을 강조한 정부가 각종 사회문제를 민간 사회복지서비스기구와의 파트너쉽을 통해 ‘전문적’으로 해결하겠다는 취지에서 도입한 사회복지가 기실 국가와 분리된 ‘사회’의 등장이 아니라 중국 국가의 구조적 폭력을 드러낸다는 점을 주장하고 있다. 대부분 농촌 출
신의 젊은 대졸자들로 구성된 사회복지사들은 도시의 과객(외지 청년)으로서, 정부의 과객(계약직 복지사)으로서 중층적 한시성(限時性)을 경험하고 있다. 지역에 대한 주민들의 귀속감을 향상시킬 임무를 부여받고 배속된 도시에서도, 사회복지의 최종 설계자이자 감독관으로서 규율권력을 행사하는 정부와의 관계에서도 온전히 포섭되지 못하는 복지사들의 변경적 조건은 이들을 쉽게 쓰고 버릴 수 있는 일회용 도구로 만들고 있다. 불안정한 조건 하에서 살아남기 위해 기층 정부기관들로부터 온갖 ‘비전문적’ 업무를 강요받는 이들이 ‘전문성’만 제고되면 사회복지가 발전할 것이라는 정부 발언을 자신들을 변호하는 정당성의 언어로 차용하는 역설적 상황
이야말로 중국 국가의 구조적 폭력을 드러내는 것이다.

As an ethnography of daily perfomances of social work, this study explores why and in what way social workers, whose autonomy the government attempted to stimulate as a new way of solving the crisis of the people’s livelihood, have come to be subject to the “mobilization unit” of the party-state. The government declared the reposition of its role from top-down intervention to a new partnership with civil organizations while emphasizing that it is no longer the “producer” of social service but its “purchaser.” Based on fieldwork in Shenzhen’s Foxconn town, however, I argue that the novel regime of social work is in fact a form of the state’s structural violence. Young social workers, who are mostly from the countryside, experience multi-layered temporalities as strange passengers both in the city and in the state apparatus. Structural violence is exercised and produced as these workers are preoccupied with “expertise” in order to defend their own legitimacy, although their precarious condition prevents them from achieving it.

This is a list of the world's largest technology companies by revenue (Datamonitor Business Review Statistics). The list includes companies whose primary business activities are associated with technology industry which includes computer hardware, software, electronics, semiconductor, internet, telecom equipment, e-commerce and computer services.
Note: The list is limited to companies with annual revenues exceeding 50 billion USD.

1. Samsung Electronics, South Korea
2. Apple Inc, USA
3. Foxconn, Taiwan
4. HP, USA
5. IBM, USA
6. Hitachi, Japan
7. Microsoft, USA
8. Amazon.com, USA
9. Sony, Japan
10. Panasonic, Japan
11. Google, USA
12. Dell, USA
13. Toshiba, Japan
14. LG Electronics, South Korea
15. Intel, United States